LYNETTE APPROVES
Eve came down to breakfast in the panelled dining-room at “Rock
Cottage,” and stood at one of the open windows, watching an Aberdeen
puppy demolishing an old shoe in the middle of the lawn. The grass had
been mown the day before, and the two big borders on the near side of
the yew hedge were full of colour, chiefly the blues of delphiniums and
the rose and white of giant stocks. Nearer still were two rose beds
planted with the choicest hybrid teas, and mauve and yellow violas. The
rock garden beyond the yew hedge had lost some of its May gorgeousness,
but the soft tints of its rocks and the greys and greens of the foliage
were very restful to the eyes. Above it hung the blue curtain of a rare
June day.
“Billy, you bad boy, come here!”
The puppy growled vigorously, and worried the shoe up and down the lawn.
“Oh, you baby! You have got to grow up into a responsible dog, and look
after my house.”
She laughed, just because she was happy, and, kneeling on the
window-seat, began a flirtation with Master Billy, who was showing off
like any small boy.
“Now, I’m sure I’m more interesting than that shoe.”
A bright eye twinkled at her.
“I suppose it is very wrong of me to let you gnaw slippers. I am sure
Mrs. Baxter is harder hearted. But you are so young, little Billy, and
too soon you will be old.”
The door opened, and a large woman with a broad and comfortable face
sailed in with a tray.
“Good morning, miss!”
“Good morning, Mrs. Baxter! Whose shoe has Billy got?”
“I’m thinking it’s one of mine, miss.”
“The wretch!”
“I gave it him, miss. It’s only an old one.”
Eve’s eyes glimmered.
“Oh, Mrs. Baxter, how very immoral of you! I thought Billy’s education
would be safe with you.”
“There, miss, he’s only a puppy.”
“But think of our responsibilities!”
“I wouldn’t give tuppence for a boy or a puppy as had no mischief in
him, miss!”
“But think of the whackings afterwards.”
“I don’t think it does no harm. I’ve no sympathy with the mollycoddles.
I do hold with a boy getting a good tanning regular. If he deserves it,
it’s all right. If he’s too goody to deserve it, he ought to get it for
not deserving of it.”
Eve laughed, and Mrs. Baxter put the tea-pot and a dish of sardines on
toast on the table. She was a local product, and an excellent one at
that, and being a widow, had been glad of a home.
“I’ve made you the China tea, miss. And the telephone man, he wants to
know when he can come and fix the hinstrument.”
“Any time this morning.”
“Thank you, miss.”
The panelled room was full of warm, yellow light, and Eve sat down at
the gate-legged table with a sense of organic and spiritual well being.
There were roses on the table, and her sensitive mouth smiled at them
expressively. In one corner stood her easel, an old mahogany bureau held
her painting kit, palettes, brushes, tubes, boards, canvases. It was
delightful to think that she could put on her sun-hat, wander out into
the great gardens, and express herself in all the colours that she
loved. Lynette’s glowing head would come dancing to her in the sunlight.
The Wilderness was still a fairy world, where mortals dreamed dreams.
There were letters beside her plate. One was from Canterton, who had
gone north to plan a rich manufacturer’s new garden. She had not seen
him since that drive to London, for he had been away when she had
arrived at “Rock Cottage” to settle the furniture and begin her new life
with Mrs. Baxter and the puppy.
She read Canterton’s letter first.
“CARISSIMA,—I shall be back to-morrow, early, as I stayed in
town for a night. Perhaps I shall find you at work. It would
please me to discover you in the rosery. I am going to place
Guinevere among the saints, and each year I shall keep St.
Guinevere’s feast day.
“I hope everything pleases you at the cottage. I purposely left
the garden in an unprejudiced state. It may amuse you to carry
out your own ideas.—_A rivederci._”
She smiled. Yes, she would go and set up her easel in the rosery, and be
ready to enter with him upon their spiritual marriage.
Under a furniture-dealer’s catalogue lay a pamphlet in a wrapper with
the address typed. Eve slit the wrapper and found that she held in her
hand an anti-suffrage pamphlet, written by Gertrude Canterton.
She was a little surprised, not having heard as yet a full account of
that most quaint and original of interviews. But she read the pamphlet
while she ate her toast, and there was a glimmer of light in her eyes
that told of amusement.
“A woman’s sphere is the home!” “A woman who is busy with her children
is busy according to Nature! No sensible person can have any sympathy
with those restless and impertinent gadabouts who thrust themselves into
activities for which they are not suited. Sex forbids certain things to
women. The eternal feminine is a force to be cherished!” “Woman is the
sympathiser, the comforter. She is the other beam of the balance. She
should strive to be opposite to man, not like him. A sweet influence in
the home, something that is dear and sacred!”
Eve asked herself how Gertrude Canterton could write like this. It was
so extraordinarily lacking in self-knowledge, and suggested the old tale
of the preacher put up to preach, the preacher who omitted to do the
things he advocated, because he was so busy telling other people what
they should do. How was it that Gertrude Canterton never saw her real
self? How did she contrive to live with theories, and to forget Lynette?
Yet in reading the pamphlet, Eve carried Gertrude Canterton’s
contentions to their logical conclusion.
“Motherhood, and all that it means, is the natural business of woman.
“Therefore motherhood should be cherished, as it has never yet been
cherished.
“Therefore, every healthy woman should be permitted to have a child.”
And here Eve folded up the pamphlet abruptly, and pushed it away across
the table.
After breakfast she went into the garden, played with Billy for five
minutes, and then wandered to and fro and up and down the stone paths of
the rock garden. There were scores of rare plants, all labelled, but the
labels were turned so that the names were hidden. Eve had been less than
a week in the cottage, but from the very first evening she had put
herself to school, to learn the names of all these rock plants. After
three days’ work she had been able to reverse the labels, and to go
round tagging long names to various diminutive clumps of foliage and
flowers, and only now and again had she to stretch out a hand and look
at a label.
All that was feminine and expressive in her opened to the sun that
morning. She went in about nine and changed her frock, putting on a
simple white dress with a low-cut collar that showed her throat. Looking
in her mirror with the tender carefulness of a woman who is beloved, it
pleased her to think that she needed one fleck of colour, a red rosebud
over the heart. She touched her dark hair with her fingers, and smiled
mysteriously into her own eyes.
She knew that she was ambitious, that her pride in her comrade
challenged the pride in herself. His homage should not be fooled. It was
a splendid spur, this love of his, and the glow at her heart warmed all
that was creative and compassionate in her. This very cottage betrayed
how his thoughts had worked for her. A big cupboard recessed behind the
oak panelling held several hundred books, the books she needed in her
work, and the books that he knew would please her. There was a little
studio built out at the back of the cottage, but he had left it bare,
for her own self to do with it what she pleased. It was this restraint,
this remembering of her individuality that delighted her. He had given
her so much, but not everything, because he had realised that it is a
rare pleasure to a working woman to spend her money in accumulating the
things that she desires.
On her way through the plantations she met Lavender, and she and
Lavender were good friends. The enthusiast in him approved of Eve. She
had eyes to see, and she did not talk the woolly stuff that he
associated with most women. Her glimpses of beauty were not adjectival,
but sharp and clear-cut, proof positive that she saw the things that she
pretended to see.
He offered to carry her easel, and she accepted the offer.
“Have you seen those Japanese irises in the water garden, Miss Carfax?”
“Yes, I am going to paint them this afternoon. Whose idea was it massing
that golden alyssum and blue lithospermum on the rocks behind them? It’s
a touch of genius.”
Lavender’s nose curved when he smiled.
“That was one of my flashes. It looks good, doesn’t it?”
“One of the things that make you catch your breath.”
He swung along with his hawk’s profile in the air.
“I fancy we’re going to do some big things in the future. If I were a
rich man and wanted the finest garden in England, I’d give Mr. Canterton
a free hand. And, excuse me saying it, miss, but I’m glad you’ve joined
us.”
He gave her a friendly glare from a dark and apprizing eye.
“I’m keen, keen as blazes, and I wouldn’t work with people who didn’t
care! Mr. Canterton showed me those pictures of yours. I should like to
have them to look at in the winter, when everything’s lying brown and
dead. If you want to know anything, Miss Carfax, at any time, I’m at
your service.”
His manners were of the quaintest, but she understood him, that he was
above jealousy, and that he looked on her as a fellow enthusiast.
“I shall bother you, Mr. Lavender, pretty often, I expect. I want to
know everything that can be known.”
“That’s the cry! But isn’t it a rum thing, Miss Carfax, how nine people
out of ten knock along as though there were nothing fit to make them
jump out of their skins with curiosity. Why I was always like a terrier
after a rat. ‘What’s this?’ ‘What’s that?’ That’s my leitmotiv. But most
people don’t ask Nature any questions. No wonder she despises them, the
dullards, just as though they hadn’t an eye to see that she’s a
good-looking woman!”
He erected her easel for her in the rosery, tilted his Panama hat, and
marched off.
Eve sought out Guinevere and sat herself down before the prospective
saint, only to find that she was in no mood for painting. Her glance
flitted from rose to rose, and the music of their names ran like a poem
through her head. Moreover, the June air was full of their perfume, a
heavy, somnolent perfume that lures one into dreaming.
Suddenly she found that he was standing in one of the black arches cut
in the yew hedge. She knew that the blood went to her face, and she
remembered telling herself that she would have to overcome these too
obvious reactions.
He came and stood beside her, looking down at her with steady and
eloquent eyes.
“You have found out Guinevere?”
“Yes. We are old friends now.”
“I am not going to market this rose. She is to be held sacred to
Fernhill. How are you getting on at the cottage?”
Her eyes glimmered to his.
“Thank you for everything.”
“And Billy pleases you?”
“He has a sense of humour.”
“And Mrs. Baxter?”
“Has what they call a motherly way with her.”
His eyes wandered round the rosery with a grave, musing look.
“I want to talk.”
“Talk to me here. I want to know how——”
“How she accepted it?”
“Yes.”
“She laughed. Thought it ridiculous. And I had been ready for a possible
tragedy!”
“What an amusing world it is.”
He moved a little restlessly.
“I want to get away from that. Let’s walk through the plantations. I
can’t keep still to-day. I want to see you everywhere, to realise you
everywhere.”
They wandered off together, walking a little apart. All about them rose
the young trees, cedars, cypresses, junipers, yews, pines, glimmering in
the June sunlight and sending out faint, balsamic perfumes. Men were
hoeing the alleys between the maples and limes, their hoes flashing when
a beam of sunlight struck through the foliage of the young trees.
Canterton stopped and spoke to the men. Also he spoke to Eve as to a
partner and a fellow-expert who understood.
“Do you think we make enough use of maples in England?”
“Isn’t there a doubt about some of them colouring well over here?”
“They give us a very fair show. The spring tints are almost as good as
the autumn ones in some cases. I want to see what you think of a new
philadelphus I have over here.”
They walked on, and when their eyes met again hers smiled into his.
“Thank you for that seriousness.”
“It was genuine enough. I am going to expect a very great deal from
you.”
“I’m glad. I’ll rise to it. It will make me very happy. Do you know I
have learnt nearly all the names of the plants in my rock garden!”
“Have you, already!”
“Yes. And I am going to study every whim and trick and habit. I am going
to be thorough!”
They came to a grove of black American spruces that were getting beyond
the marketable age, having grown to a height of fifteen or twenty feet.
The narrow path was in the shade, a little secret path that cut through
the black glooms like a river through a mountainous land.
Canterton was walking behind her.
“Hold out your hand!”
Without turning her head she held her hand out palm upwards, and felt
something small dropped into it.
“Wear it—under your dress.”
It was a little gold ring, the token of their spiritual marriage.
They came out into the sunshine, and Eve’s eyes were mistily bright. She
had not spoken, but her lips were quivering sensitively. She had slipped
the ring on to her finger.
“A king’s ransom for your thoughts!”
She turned to him with an indescribable smile.
“I am Lynette’s fairy mother. Oh, how good!”
“For her?”
“And for me.”
“I have a formal invitation to deliver from Lynette. She hailed me out
of the window. We are to have tea in the Wilderness, and Billy is
asked.”
“The Wilderness! That is where we forget to be clever.”
They came round to the heath garden where it overhung the green spires
of the larches.
“I am going on with my book. Your name will be added to it.”
“May I sign the plates?”
“Oh, we’ll have you on the title-page, ‘Paintings by Eve Carfax.’ And I
shall ask you to go pilgrimaging again, as you went to Latimer.”
She drew in her breath sharply.
“Ah, Latimer! I shall be dreaming dreams. But I want some of them to be
real.”
“Tell me them!”
“I want to help other women; help them over the rough places.”
“You can do it. I mean you to have a name and a career.”
“I don’t want to live only for self.”
“First make ‘self’ a strong castle, then think of helping the
distressed. We are only just at the beginning of things, you and I.
We’ll have a rest home for tired workers. I know of a fine site in my
pine woods. And you will become a woman of affairs.”
“I shall never rush about and make speeches!”
“No, I don’t think you will do that.”
They turned towards the white gate, and heard the voice of
Lynette—Lynette who had been giving chase.
“Daddy! Miss Eve!”
She came on them, running; glowing hair tossing in the sunlight, red
mouth a little breathless.
“Oh, Miss Eve, the fairies have asked you to tea!”
“I know. I have heard!”
She caught Lynette, and kneeling, drew her into her arms with a great
spasm of tenderness.
“I am going to be a fairy, one of your fairies, for ever and ever.”
“Be the Queen Fairy!”
“Yes, yes.”
“For ever and ever. I think God is very kind. I did ask Him so hard.”
“Dear!”
Lynette had never been kissed as she was kissed at that moment.
* * * * *
Made and Printed in Great Britain by
The Greycaine Book Manufacturing Company Limited, Watford
50.428
_NOVELS BY_
_WARWICK DEEPING_
KITTY
DOOMSDAY
SORRELL AND SON
SUVLA JOHN
THREE ROOMS
THE SECRET SANCTUARY
ORCHARDS
LANTERN LANE
SECOND YOUTH
COUNTESS GLIKA
UNREST
THE PRIDE OF EVE
THE KING BEHIND THE KING
THE HOUSE OF SPIES
SINCERITY
FOX FARM
BESS OF THE WOODS
THE RED SAINT
THE SLANDERERS
THE RETURN OF THE PETTICOAT
A WOMAN’S WAR
VALOUR
BERTRAND OF BRITTANY
UTHER AND IGRAINE
THE HOUSE OF ADVENTURE
THE PROPHETIC MARRIAGE
APPLES OF GOLD
THE LAME ENGLISHMAN
MARRIAGE BY CONQUEST
JOAN OF THE TOWER
MARTIN VALLIANT
RUST OF ROME
THE WHITE GATE
THE SEVEN STREAMS
MAD BARBARA
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation has been corrected without note. Other errors have been
corrected as noted below:
Page 113, ‘It’s’ time is so ==> ‘Its’ time is so
Page 210, I canot help ==> I cannot help
Page 284, was bcoming an ==> was becoming an
Page 313, been turfed aand planted ==> been turfed and planted